


Better Late Than Pregnant

by MaloryArcher



Series: #ClexaWeek2018 [5]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: #ClexaWeek2018, Accidental Stimulation, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Clexa Week 2018, Day Four, Doctor/Patient, F/F, Flirting, Pregnancy, Romance, Surrogacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 19:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14196438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaloryArcher/pseuds/MaloryArcher
Summary: Between the exhausting and romance-repelling pregnancy she's carrying for her friends and the last-minute absence of her usual doctor, Clarke Griffin feels justified in her terrible mood. Her back-up doctor might just prove her wrong.





	Better Late Than Pregnant

**Author's Note:**

> A month late, but, in the immortal words of Blanche Devereaux, "better late than pregnant".

“Clarke,” the nurse calls, smiling from the open doorway, tablet in hand. She waits for Clarke to peel herself from the seat she’s been waiting in, steps aside to let Clarke through the door before it swings closed behind them, gives her the quick up-down glance while she leads her to an exam room.

Everybody gives her the up-down glance these days, even the non-medical professionals, so Clarke is adept at ignoring it.

The nurse, Zoey, Clarke remembers even before the woman reminds her, has been here almost every time Clarke has over the last few years.

They stop at the last room on the left, where Zoey opens the door for Clarke to walk through and offers to help her with her coat and shoes while Clarke drops her purse onto one of the chairs. Zoey is patient when Clarke stubbornly says she can do it herself, gracious when Clarke realizes she was wrong a few moments later, and positively unflappable when she has to escort Clarke to the small bathroom across the hall where Clarke loudly groans in annoyance for even longer than she can make herself pee less than ten minutes after her last bathroom break.

Nurse Zoey’s smile holds strong as she accepts a plastic bag-wrapped cup of Clarke’s urine and quickly disappears it into the proper room for testing.

She leads Clarke back to the room where her things are, helps her up onto the scale against the wall and doesn’t read the number out loud when Clarke pointedly looks away. She even pushes a button that makes some magical step appear low on the examination table, so Clarke won’t have to strain to get herself onto the translucent paper sheet.

The nurse leaves a paper gown on the edge of the table, and Clarke just sighs at it, knowing the hell it’ll be to get herself out of everything else and into that.

They’ve seen a lot a lot of each other over the last year, Clarke and Nurse Zoey. Or, at least, Zoey has seen quite a bit of Clarke. In the waiting room. In the exam room. In stirrups, from the other side of a paper partition.

Zoey’s seen so much of Clarke, and put up with so many of Clarke’s moods, that it’s more annoying than embarrassing when Clarke has to ask, “could you pull this off, before you go,” as she holds out a long sleeve of her open flannel shirt. 

“Just flip this switch when you’re all changed, and Dr. Nash will be ready when you are,” Zoey promises, helping Clarke to shrug off her outer shirt and leaving her to get out of the t-shirt and elastic-waist pants.

She’s nice, Zoey, and good at her job, but Clarke can’t bring herself to even smile at the poor woman as she murmurs out her thanks.

Dr. Nash isn’t Clarke’s regular doctor. Dr. Nash isn’t the one who’s been answering Clarke’s questions at odd hours. Dr. Nash hasn’t known Clarke since she was barely old enough to drink. Dr. Nash isn’t one of Clarke’s mother’s most trusted former colleagues. Dr. Nash hasn’t already seen Clarke naked from the waist down enough times that she doesn’t even feel anxious about it anymore.

Dr. Sinclair is Clarke’s regular doctor. Dr. Nash is just the runner up, while Dr. Sinclair handles some sort of unexpected family thing.

And that fact, the whole ‘Dr. Nash is taking over for Clarke’s regular doctor’ thing, is tanking Clarke’s mood far more than her hormones or her heartburn or her cankles or her—

Actually, Clarke has no shortage of reasons to be cranky, but she’s fully prepared to place all the blame on Dr. Nash until this mood swings in another direction.

Clarke gets changed, begrudgingly, in about twice the time it would take if she weren’t the size of a house. She flips the light across the room, then shuffles back onto the exam table, only just settling atop it before a sharp knock sounds at the door.

“Come in,” Clarke says, and then the door is opening to reveal this Dr. Nash person she’s been so unenthused about meeting.

“Ms. Griffin,” the woman starts, letting herself fully into the room and shutting the door behind her, a tablet in one hand and the other extending toward Clarke, “I’m Dr. Nash. I trust that Zoey told you I’d be taking over for Dr. Sinclair today?”

Clarke feels like there’s a frog in her throat.

Dr. Nash is no Dr. Sinclair—and she adores Dr. Sinclair, really—but Dr. Nash _is_ alarmingly gorgeous.

She’s younger than Clarke was expecting; if she’s older than Clarke, it isn’t by much, and there’s no way she’s past her mid-thirties. Her skin is flawless and smooth-looking, her hair long and brown with curly little wisps breaking free of the braid slung over one shoulder. Her eyes are the most perfect shade of green, lined slightly with a ring of brown or blue, but Clarke can’t tell which.

Clarke thinks she’d be happy to keep staring until she figures it out, but then she remembers she’s wearing a paper gown. She’s wearing a paper gown, and hasn’t washed her hair in a few days, and is getting every bit of acne she missed out on as a teenager because of the hormones coursing through her, and looks exactly as exhausted as she feels, and is still determined to lean into this awful mood.

“Yeah,” Clarke answers the doctor, and accepts her hand, “I got the heads up.”

“Excellent,” she smiles, and it’s a damn good smile, but Clarke just feels like being a grumpy mess today, so she won’t let that smile take that away from her. “I know it can’t be ideal to have your OB unavailable for this, but I can assure you we’ll get through this appointment just fine.”

“Sure,” Clark agrees, unconvinced, stretching her hands back on the table.

Dr. Nash, whose first name must start with an ‘A’ based on her ID badge, skims through whatever she’s seeing on her tablet and sits on the edge of the rolling stool that had been tucked under the counter.

“Looks like we’re still early in the third trimester,” the brunette trails off, and Clarke rolls her eyes. “Just over the thirty-week mark.”

Dr. Sinclair knows better than to use “we” when he means “you”.

“ _I_ sure am.”

“And you’re on track for bimonthly visits,” Dr. Nash states, one long finger dragging along her screen.

“Yep,” Clarke says, popping the ‘p’, “Dr. Sinclair and I set all the dates in advance last time I was here.”

Dr. Nash either doesn’t pick up on Clarke’s sharpness or she’s enough of a professional to ignore it.

“Excellent,” Dr. Nash tells her, smiling that annoyingly nice smile. “Welcome to the home stretch, Ms. Griffin. You’ll be meeting your baby before know it.”

Another rookie mistake, and one Clarke’s surprised isn’t noted in her chart.

“Not my baby,” Clarke tells the doctor shortly, and that smile slips and gives way to confusion. “But I am more than ready to get her out of my body and hand her over to her dads.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor says, “I didn’t realize—”

“As Dr. Sinclair knows,” Clarke starts, because it isn’t a huge inconvenience to give one more person the surrogacy spiel, but it is both unexpected and irritating to have to explain it in places that boast thick files of her personal information and medical history, “I agreed to carry this baby for my friends, long before anyone did me the courtesy of revealing that morning sickness was an all-day thing.”

“That was kind of you,” the doctor says, softening in a way that Clarke doesn’t expect because she wasn’t exactly rigid before, but, for a moment, she seems loose and open and impressed, and Clarke doesn’t know what to do with it. “I’m sorry about the morning sickness.”

Clarke’s hands drag from the paper sheet beneath her to her lap and she shrugs.

“I’m getting major godmother points, at least. Looking like a beached whale is a small price to pay.”

The doctor laughs quietly, her hands folded over her crossed legs.

“You don’t look like a beached whale.”

“They pay you to say that,” Clarke rolls her eyes, because she doesn’t need Dr. Gorgeous to lie to her face. “What’s the plan for today?”

“We’ll start with a few questions I have for you, if that’s okay?”

Clarke still isn’t sacrificing her terrible mood for that smile when Dr. Nash rolls it out again, but it’s so sincere and tired around the edges that Clarke just nods.

Dr. Nash is polite when she clarifies a few things and asks Clarke for the usual updates, or, at least, the updates that seem usual based on her last visit. The doctor wants to know whether she’s been sleeping, if she’s still taking her vitamins and depriving herself of caffeine, if her heart burn has been any better with Dr. Sinclair’s recommendations, if she’s felt the baby move any more or less than usual, if she has any new concerns.

Clarke grumbles out her answers: _barely, and only on my left side_ ; _yes, even though I can smell the capsules from a mile away and they leave an awful taste in my mouth, and yes, even though I fantasize about downing an extra tall Americano almost daily_ ; _worse, actually_ ; _same as always, she waits until I’m comfortable to get all squirmy and then lodges her feet between my ribs_ ; _only where I can find double wide size nine shoes, maternity dresses that don’t literally look like circus tents, and any product that will make my stretch marks look less violently red_.

The doctor listens attentively and makes a few suggestions that Clarke hasn’t heard yet from Dr. Sinclair—she wants to dismiss them on principle, of course, but, as much as she loves Dr. Sinclair, he’d been clueless about the exact same maternity dress question, and his cocoa butter recommendation was weak in the face of Clarke’s aversion to the most random of smells.

She’s nice, Dr. Nash, and sincere. Clarke knows it shouldn’t impress her, not with Dr. Sinclair and Nurse Zoey and the rest of the people she’s gotten to know over the years setting the bar so high, but Dr. Nash is all those things and she has particularly nice voice, smooth and confident, but gentle, and she’s so pretty it’s almost offensive.

Almost offensive, but, thanks to the hormones, Clarke can’t be as angry as she is captivated by a face like that.

The doctor rehashes conversations Clarke has already had with Dr. Sinclair, the basics of what she should be looking out for and what should or shouldn’t concern her now, and Clarke half-listens while deciding that Dr. Nash’s eyes are lined with a grey-ish brown.

“Is that okay, Ms Griffin,” the doctor asks, and Clarke realizes that she’s missed a question, and those green eyes, with their grey-ish brown outline are more expectant-looking than they were a minute ago.

The doctor scoots back on her stool, rising up and rolling the small chair back under the counter. She looks at Clarke while she rolls up the sleeves of her white coat, then prompts again, “Ms. Griffin?”

“Clarke,” the blonde tells her, mostly because Dr. Sinclair always calls her Clarke, but also because Clarke doesn’t know how to answer the question, and she needs a few more seconds of clarity before she embarrasses herself asking the doctor to repeat it.

“Clarke,” the doctor says, and if Clarke wasn’t hanging on to her crabbiness with both hands, the sound of her first name leaving this very attractive, well-spoken, presumably highly intelligent woman’s lips would elevate her mood right from the floor to the sky, “are you comfortable with a brief physical exam? It’s not invasive, but I’d like to check you for any abnormal swelling.”

“Oh,” Clarke says, considering Dr. Nash’s hands, those long careful fingers that she watched glide along the surface of a tablet, that she saw interlocked in the doctor’s lap while Clarke spoke and then gesticulating almost wildly when the doctor did, making physical contact with her body. “That’s fine.”

And fine is…an understatement, at best.

A lie, even.

It’s not fine, Clarke thinks, when the doctor smiles and turns her back to wash her hands in the small basin. Clarke isn’t proud of glancing down, trying to check out Dr. Nash’s backside even while it’s covered by the white coat, but she feels fine blaming _that_ on the hormones.

When the doctor is soaped and scrubbed and dried, she turns back to Clarke, still smiling, and that smile is still captivating, and she moves toward Clarke at what must be an average pace but feels like the speed of light and fills Clarke with butterflies. It’s as though Dr. Sinclair didn’t check these exact things two weeks ago while also preparing her mentally for the gradually more invasive check-ups drawing closer with each week.

It’s not fine when the doctor says, “I’m going to check your face first.”

It’s terrifying, because the doctor is standing so close when Clarke nods, and then those hands are pressing gently to Clarke’s face. Warm fingertips, maybe a little chapped from all the washing Dr. Nash must do, skate along the surface of Clarke’s skin, while those eyes follow their path. Clarke forgets to stress about her acne, either the doctor judging her for it or somehow making it worse, because she’s so distracted by the feeling, by the proximity, by the quietly pleased humming the doctor does as she rules out excessive swelling in different parts of Clarke’s face.

Clarke doesn’t know where to look, because staring into the doctor’s eyes with so little distance between them is more terrifying than surrendering to her careful touch, but then, Clarke looks at her lips and there’s this little freckle that Clarke’s pregnant brain wants to hone in, and all she can do to stop it is to hook her fingers back under the thin paper beneath her and try to focus on the crinkling she causes.

If the doctor feels the way Clarke’s pulse picks up, she’s, again, either polite enough or professional enough to accept it without mentioning it.

She asks Clarke to hold out her hands next, forcing her to release the paper sheet. The doctor eyes them before she reaches out to curl her own hands around one of them. She traces the skin on the back of Clarke’s hand, observes her swollen fingers, reassures her they’re fairly typical when Clarke half-jokes-half-stutters that she has sausage hands, then switches to the other.

It’s thrilling, more than terrifying, to be touched so carefully and by someone who looks like Dr. Nash.

Of course, Clarke is very pregnant, and, surrogate or not, she’s not sure the words exist within her lexicon to protect her from the exact strain of unwitting celibacy that comes with a belly she can’t sleep on or see her feet around or fit into her favorite clothing or hide. Being touched _at all_ by an attractive person who asked her permission first and isn’t also reading about Roman emperors or singing lullabies directly at her belly button might be affecting how strongly she feels about it.

“I’ll take a look at your ankles next,” the doctor informs her.

Clarke nods again, because none of this should be stimulating. The harsh lighting of the exam room. The bits of plastic that take over where the paper doesn’t reach, to separate her bare legs from the vinyl that covers the table. The taupe paint on the walls. The hands of a strange woman touching Clarke in expressly non-erotic places to assess her health.

It shouldn’t be stimulating, but Clarke leans her hands back again and, as best as can, extends her leg to Dr. Nash so she won’t have to stoop far to grab her ankle, and when those fingers wrap around the bone—or around where she’d be able to feel bone if not for ungodly water retention—Clarke moans.

The doctor barely touches her, barely touches what Clarke thinks is the least sexual part of this body that all her past and prospective sexual partners seem to agree is off-limits until she’s several months post-partum and a lot less emotionally volatile, and Clarke honest-to-god moans.

Dr. Nash looks up then, quick and almost confused, but, by the time she looks down the recognition has dawned on her and the damage is done. The doctor flushes in embarrassment because, of course, she heard it practically echo off the walls.

“I’m so sorry,” Clarke says, and she’s far too contrite to worry about maintaining or displaying any mood.

The doctor is just holding on for a few moments, giving Clarke enough time to get too caught up in shame to moan again at the prolonged contact.

“Don’t worry about it,” the doctor tells her, moving her fingertips and still staring steadfastly at Clarke’s ankles.

“My body’s a mess. I can hardly control it these days,” Clarke tries to explain.

“It’s hardly uncommon,” Dr. Nash brushes her off, letting Clarke relax the first ankle and moving to the second, “Even in some patients who aren’t pregnant, Ms. Griffin. It’s really okay.”

“Clarke, please,” she reminds the doctor, sighing when the woman nods without looking up, “And I know you’re just saying that to placate me because I’m a moody hippo, but it’s helping.”

“I’m not sure how to respond to that,” the doctor admits, and then, a few quiet seconds later, she adds, “You’re not a hippo, Clarke, and pregnancy hormones have been known to make even the toughest pregnant people among us a little moody.”

“Are you calling me moody,” Clarke snaps, and the doctor’s grimace is enough for Clarke to reign in that impulse, because, finally, she’s decided to loosen her hold on her shitty mood. “Of course you aren’t,” Clarke acknowledges, “I’m just kind of a mess, and now I’ve snapped at you and moaned at you and, god, now I’m babbling at you. I’m really not always like this,” she swears, “they don’t warn you at surrogate school, but this whole single and knocked up and achy and gross and moody thing actually sucks.”

Dr. Nash releases Clarke’s ankle and backs away from her, only long enough to retrieve her stool and roll it close enough to keep a respectful distance.

“I wasn’t aware that surrogate school was a thing,” is all Dr. Nash says, curious.

“It’s not so much a school as a bunch of sites we Googled and bookmarked before we decided to do this. There are long articles on support systems and contracts with the parents, but nothing about looking like a water buffalo while feeling like a cat in heat,” Clarke huffs.

“And nothing about all-day morning sickness,” the doctor reminds her.

“Not as thorough as I initially assumed,” Clarke says, impressed at Dr. Nash’s listening skills, and her restraint.

The flush in her cheeks is gone, and she isn’t so much as side-eyeing Clarke, just sitting on her rolling stool, calm and understanding and too pretty for Clarke to think straight.

“You don’t look like a water buffalo,” Dr. Nash starts, “or a hippo, or a beached whale, I can assure you. Your hormones are playing an awful trick on you.”

“You have to say that so I don’t freak out and pregnancy rage this place to the ground.”

“You’re gorgeous,” Dr. Nash tells her, leaning slightly forward, and Clarke’s belly gets so fluttery that she feels it in her heart, too, and it makes her nervous that her body will be riotous enough to moan again, “I’m saying that because it’s true, and because anybody who can’t appreciate your body right now, exactly as it is, or what you’re doing for your friends, has a problem unrelated to your pregnancy.”

And then Dr. Nash blushes again, clears her throat, scoots her stool a little further away, and smooths her hands along her slacks.

Before Clarke can decide whether to thank her or voice her disbelief, the doctor says, “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate of me,” looking down at her own hands.

“I don’t mind,” Clarke tries to say, because she can’t find a fault in a compliment that made her feel better than she has all day, but the doctor presses on.

“Your face, hands and ankles are well within the range of what we expect for third trimester swelling, but, as Dr. Sinclair has probably mentioned, he’ll look at your next appointment,” she spins around to wake the tablet on the counter, “which you have scheduled for two weeks from today.”

“Right,” Clarke nods, and she watches the doctor rise up again, picking up her tablet and spinning around, this time to lean against the counter itself, even further from Clarke.

“In that case,” Dr. Nash says, “I think we’re all done here, unless you have any last questions for me.”

Clarke makes eye contact with the doctor, can’t stop herself from asking, “Would you be taking back that compliment if I weren’t on your exam table today?”

Dr. Nash seems to startle, those green eyes widening almost imperceptibly before she purses her lips.

“Hypothetically,” Clarke tags on, hoping it’ll keep the doctor from shutting down.

“I’m not taking back the compliment,” Dr. Nash says firmly, and then more softly, “and, you are on my table, Clarke.”

“But, I won’t be in two weeks,” Clarke says, even though she doesn’t really know this woman, and, for all she knows, Dr. Nash is just _super_ passionate about affirming pregnant people when their hormones make them think their bodies have turned on them.

Even though there’s only a small window left in which this unpredictable and constantly expanding body can even hypothetically be touched before there’s another human coming out of it and several weeks of untouchable recovery after that.

“In two weeks you won’t be,” Dr. Nash agrees, cradling her tablet.

“Maybe we’ll run into each other,” Clarke hopes.

She hopes, because her bad mood didn’t stand a chance against those eyes or those hands or that voice. She hopes, because, as much as she loves Dr. Sinclair and is looking forward to having him back, she likes Dr. Nash, and not just the look of her. She hopes, because she’s seven-and-a-half months pregnant, and she looks it, and Dr. Nash is the only person who’s managed to see that without somehow making Clarke feel terribly about it. She hopes, because, she isn’t sure yet, but Dr. Nash seems to be hoping for the same thing.

“Maybe,” Dr. Nash says, and Clarke thinks it’s a little wistful, wonders if this doctor won’t go out of her way to avoid her in the future because, as far as Clarke can tell, she’s a complete professional, and presumably wary of being fixated on by patients, even if they aren’t usually hers.

“One more question,” Clarke says, before she can stop herself. She waits for Dr. Nash to incline her head toward her before she asks, because she needs to know, even if she’ll only just barely miss seeing this woman again for the next ten weeks, “What does the ‘A’ stand for?”

Dr. Nash looks down at her badge, and then up at Clarke.

“Alexandria,” the doctor tells her, “but I prefer Lexa.”

“Lexa,” Clarke repeats, testing the name in her mouth. “I like it.”

Dr. Nash, Lexa, Clarke corrects, smiles when Clarke says it. It’s still as warm and sincere and tired around the eyes as earlier, but Clarke sees a hint of amusement, too.

“Two weeks, Clarke,” she reminds her, not yet making a move toward the door, which she has to do so that Clarke can waddle around redressing herself.

“Two weeks, Lexa,” Clarke smiles, unsure about what to expect in two weeks’ time, but excited, nonetheless.


End file.
